


He's Fast, She's Weird

by clutzycricket



Series: Pathways and Maybes [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Twins, Gen, Road Trip from Hell, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 03:34:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4731359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clutzycricket/pseuds/clutzycricket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's always been Rhaenys and Aegon, each other's mirrors and filling in each others cracks, even when Dad goes crazy after Mom dies and buys an RV to tour Mexico on sabbatical. Even when crazy bank robbers take them hostage.</p><p>Aegon protects Rhaenys, Rhaenys thinks their way out. They can always depend on each other.</p><p>(Then comes the chute, the question, and the labyrinth. Oh, and the vampires.)</p><p>Or, the From Dusk Till Dawn fusion my brain cooked up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He's Fast, She's Weird

**Author's Note:**

> Rhaegar teaches at Blackstock, from Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. Somehow, the writing style occasionally reflects this and I add some references in. Short but chock full of references. If you think you get one, toss me a review, and you get a prompt. Or a review.

1.

Dad went a little crazy when Mom died, the Twins agreed. Rhaegar Targaryen had been a bit strange before, but Mom had kept him on the straight and narrow. But when the cancer from her childhood came back and killed her quick, the respectable professor was gone and a crazy wood elf decided to buy an RV.

“… _Mexico_ ,” Rhae said, Liz Taylor eyes meeting Aegon’s black ones. “Why Mexico? Romania, I’d get, myths and legends and Godmom Mel is doing a sabbatical there. England, totally. Or sending us to Mom’s family in Cairo…”

“You do remember Uncle Oberyn punching Dad at the funeral, right?” Aegon said, dip-dyed hair flopping in his eyes. “I don’t think Dad would let us.”

The Twins were mirrors, tall and rangy- Aegon had two inches on her, silver blonde hair to her raven black, dark eyes to her light, with the same curling hair framing fox faces and Mom’s olive skin.

In good times, their parents had joked that they were two halves of a whole. Aegon was a track star, sharp-tongued and his impulsive temper held back by Rhaenys more often then not. Rhaenys was bookish, popular for helping tutor an alarming amount of the school, the sort to always have good advice.

(Aegon hadn’t said anything when she borrowed the car to take crying girls places, even lying to their parents. He knew the Planned Parenthood or the drugstore that actually sold Plan B was well within the range of her trips, and mistaking her kindness for weakness meant forgetting that she was a computer whiz.)

So when they stop at the Dragon Scale Inn, Aegon grins and looks at the pool, waving her off.

“I’ll look out for the nutty professor for a bit, Scarlet,” he laughed, and she changed into a suit before her Dad could say anything.

Track had been Aegon’s thing, but swimming had been hers- not on the team, because competition and rules weren’t really her thing, but there had been a pool, and an indoor community one she’d let a boy with the keys fondle her breasts for a minute so they could swim during a lock in. 

So she swam laps, making herself a knife and slapping the wall, until the man calls her.

She tosses her head back, wishing she’d thought to braid her hair. “What?”

“That phone yours?” The man is lean and wearing a suit like a Bible Salesman, or something out of an old movie, watching her as if she wasn’t all there.

There is something very broken with this man, the part of her that had her mother had ruefully called her midsummer sense said. She itched for Asha at her back, or Robar before he proved to be a complete  _shithead_.

And her phone is going off, the Lord of the Rings ringtone she picked out for Dad, so she gets out of the pool, seeing the missed call and the text.

_Ass. Up. Now._

One day Aegon will text in complete sentences. Today is clearly not that day. Besides- she’s still pissed. At Aegon for thinking he could hide the fact that Robar cheated on her with the Vance girl who called her a Heathers knock-off, at Dad for breaking the way he did, instead of something actually useful, at Mom for dying and leaving her with these nutcases, at Uncle Oberyn for not sweeping her away like he did for his girls. 

Oh, and Aunt Melisandre, for not being home to talk Dad out of this trip. She’d be fine, once she cooled off and tired herself out, but right now she really didn’t want to go play Wendybird to the Lost Boys.

She shot Aunt Mel another cranky email, then one to Allyria. 

“Did you ever feel like your life was turned…” Rhaenys could speak four languages, two useful, thanks dad, but the words were hard. “Like you were walking through smoke along a cliff? One wrong step and you’ll fall off, and all you have is your faith to get you home.”

“Or maybe a guide,” the man said, a tired sort of look on his face, and his hand is bleeding through a bandage. 

“’Suppose it depends on the person,” Rhaenys said, musingly. She supposes she should get back to her family, as fun as that will be.

And then she gets a gun  _pointed in her face_. Thanks, Dad. Murderous bank robbers Will and Garlan Tyrell are really what she needs.

“Sorry, Ragnell,” he whispers, twirling a curl. She’d chopped it all raggedy shoulder-short the first time he’d gotten so drunk he’d called her  _Elia_.

2.

The RV is shit, because Mom always bought their cars and taught Rhae to do the same, but Aegon can tell that Dad wasn’t thinking.

And he isn’t allowed to punch Dad, in a different way than he isn’t allowed to punch people at school. (For calling Rhaenys a slut for having breasts and not being blonde and lacy, from what he knows, for having a Mom from Egypt, for Dad’s crazy, for liking boys as well as girls.) Dad’s sick in the head, he thinks, but not enough to get himself locked up. 

Rhae says that’s good, because no one will give a fifty-something man with a serious disease or a playboy with eight daughters both of whom aren’t in the country much less the state,custody of them, even if they are just shy of eighteen. Which leaves Crazy Uncle Viserys, who Aegon would murder the second he got handsy on Rhae, or maybe Nym, at least until they are old enough to go back to Blackstock.

So they go along with Dad, because Rhae remembered to make sure they could do online school if they were caught out in the summer. Medeous wants Rhae for the Classics department, he knows, and Carter wants her for English, so they’ll fight for her soul.

Meanwhile, Aegon is using his dark eyes to watch the bank robbers holding them hostage. The saner one, with broader shoulders and a perpetual look of “the fuck is my life” that Aegon would normally appreciate, is up front with Dad and a gun. Dad is doing pretty well- he’s stepping out of his little dreamworld.

The freakier one, Willas, with the golden eyes and hand Rhaenys was bandaging up, was watching them both as if they were a puzzle. “Garlan?”

“What’s up, Will?” Garlan asked. 

“The boy,” Will said, and Rhae stiffened. “And the man. I have to shoot them.”

“No you don’t,” she said, voice firm. It was her “arguing with professors who were red and terrifying and fucking sexually confusing” voice, the one she used to smack down that asshole who thought he could claim he slept with her. “We are holding up our end of the deal.”

“ _Ragnell_ ,” Dad said, because Dad always called her by that stupid nickname. Apparently Mom had found out what happened to… every other Rhaenys Targaryen and Dad had absently renamed her Ragnell after the Arthurian story. Mom refused to make it official. 

“No one is shooting anyone yet,” Garlan said, looking anxiously at his brother, and okay, Aegon got that look. It was his look when Rhae wrinkled her nose at someone who turned out to be a dick, or her grumbled curses followed by a string of bad luck.

It had been the other half of the reason, besides the look- Aegon the silver haired track star, Rhae his dark haired shadow. 

 _He’s fast, she’s weird_. Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch- it had been a joke at school, even.

“There are demons in them,” Willas told her, head tilted. “It would be kinder.”

“You said you see things- is it the future?” Rhaenys asked, propping her head up. Garlan’s relaxing, though, and Willas looks fascinated.

“Truths- I can’t tell anything more,” he admitted. 

“Then it might be a future, or it might be a truth,” and there was the same simple acceptance that had came up when he mentioned that maybe he had a crush on Robb Stark, which had really only changed their relationship because they bickered about who was the hotter Musketeer.

(Rhae picked Aramis, Aegon was more a Porthos man.)

“So you believe me,” he said, shooting a look at his brother. 

“More importantly, I believe that people can see things like that,” she shrugged, loose pink sweater falling further. “But every message we have about those messages is the same- don’t treat them as the gospel truth.”

“Arthur, Oedipus, everyone trying to prevent a tragedy and causing it to happen,” Dad said, professor voice on. “She has a point.”

“And if it is a truth, then well, we all have our sins,” and Aegon can’t help the deadpan stare at the gun at his face, and is wildly, crazily grateful that Auntie Melisandre kept track of Rhae so much, because this is all Aunt Mel.

Garlan snorted at that. “Ain’t that the truth, little girl.”

But the freaky brother puts the gun down, and Rhae gives him that tiny smile that made people stupid.

“Ragnell?” Garlan asks.

“The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” Aegon sighed. “Arthur was hunting and slew a deer on lands that belonged to a lord. The brother surprised King Arthur, defeated him and stated that Sir Gawain had been unjustly been given part of that lord’s lands, and asked Arthur what women wanted. He told Arthur he had a year to answer or by the rules of honor he was to forfeit his life.”

“Harsh punishment,” Garlan said, eyebrows quirked. “I assume he got the answer?”

“A crone by the road promised him the answer, provided she was allowed to marry the knight of her choice,” Rhaenys said, mildly. “She chose Sir Gawain.”

“What was the answer? I’ve got an ex-wife who would be surprised I know,” Garlan snarked. 

“ _Sovereignty_ ,” Rhaenys said, and the slight echo in her voice was odd, and Aegon just wanted to go  _home_. “And the lady was not what she seemed either, but a great beauty under a curse, which Gawain broke by giving it to her. She also turned out to be Sir Gromer’s sister.”

Willas gave a faint smile. “Well, that answers why he was asking?”

“One of my colleagues has the theory that Sir Gromer in Dame Ragnell’s tale is the same as Sir Gromer in the tale of Sir Gawain and the Turk, though his evidence is wretched,” Dad said. “Scotland and the Isle of Man… But Elia loathed Rhaenys’ name, so when we attempted to rename her..” He frowned. “She didn’t let me file the paperwork.”

Rhaenys gave Aegon a long-suffering look. 

But then they get to the border, and Aegon goes in, and he’s terrified, because while Rhae is a bit Luna Lovegood, Aegon loses his temper too much, he knows it, and he was going to get help once he finally gets away from Dad, he can’t risk anything happening to his twin right now. 

So when the border agent tells him to go and help the Tyrells, a little prickle of fear worries its way down his back.

3.

Rhaenys brought a book into the club, because she’s not fond of loud noises or crowds and Garlan stole her phone. 

And okay, she knows that cliches occasionally come from somewhere, but really, the Titty Twister? And the jetting flame?

(And that  _jackass_  Garlan punched. She’s keeping Aegon on a leash.)

And Garlan’s in the mood for a rambling confession, something a bit out of it in his expression. And maybe he’s as done with everything as she is, right now, which is why she watches as Garlan and Aegon do tequila shots. Dad looks very out of place in all of this, glaring at them both until she nurses a tiny bit to help cope with the… everything.

But like hell is she going along with Aegon’s expression right now, when he’s going to confess for her. Dad doesn’t know about Meraxes, and she likes it that way.

“I kissed Cate Bracken in the tunnels at the university,” she said, meeting each gaze evenly, tilting her head like Aunt Ellaria does when she wants to get under someone’s skin. Cate Bracken is nineteen and actually in college, a theater major who is on the fringes of that weird feud Aunt Mel has with the new Head of Classics. 

“Yeah, you stay in the closet, though,” Aegon said. He’d always been a pissy drunk, and he’d apologize when the hangover cleared. 

She shrugged. “I don’t date enough for it to come up. Only benefit of swinging both ways, I guess.”

“What about you, professor?” Garlan asked, because he’d been staring, and Dad looked up.

“Ah, well, running through various demonology pleas to turn back the last few days,” he said lightly. “Also, does this place look like a temple to you?”

“It’s creepy and horror movie like,” Aegon agreed, and Rhaenys wanted some of the whiskey she and Ed Tully drank last New Year’s.

Willas was with them again, and sitting next to her, peeking at her book. She flipped it up so he could see the cover-  _War of the Oaks_ \- as they announced the Main Event.

She heard the brothers hissing at each other. “It’s her!”

“Who?” Garlan asked, something wary in his voice.

“The woman from my visions!” he said, and she studied the woman more closely.

Santantico Pandemonium was not her real name, hopefully- though to be fair, Rhaenys or Ragnell Daena Targaryen was a bitch of a name. She was stunningly gorgeous, and Rhaenys truly wanted to sit at her feet and learn how she did her lipstick. 

And then she vanished and reappeared, and  _oh, magic_  was added to the list, with a muffled sort of clarity that was probably shock compounded by the attacking thing.

4.

 _Vampires_. Aegon pulled a stunned Rhaenys away from the stage, curling tight around his sister with the stolen gun held at the ready.

“Use a table,” she hissed, and they made their way to a wall, Rhaenys stopping to dip her hands in blood, streaking Aegon’s neck.

“Don’t you think they’ll be able to tell?” he asked.

She frowned, pupils blown wide the way they had last Halloween, when she’d curled up near the pond and sang old folksongs ‘til dawn. Scarlet Witch, they joked… “Maybe. But just in case…” She streaked her own throat.

“I won’t let them hurt you,” he promised, and shot one, sending it skittering for easier prey. Rhaenys was looking at the bottles, picking up a shot glass and a rag.

“You have a lighter?”

So, they caught on fire, and a long stick they used together killed it, until the creatures washed away.

“Dad?” Rhaenys called, hand in his. The doors and windows have grating on them, and it looked old. No locks, either.

“Here, Ragnell,” he said, holding a handgun gingerly. Both the Tyrell brothers were there, and some guy with a metal codpiece. Because tonight can’t get any weirder.

“Who are you?” Aegon asked. 

“Professor Euron Greyjoy,” he said. He looked like some bad cosplay of that fairy tale show pirate. With an eyepatch.

“He calls himself Sex Machine,” Rhaenys added, sounding like Mom when she had someone by the short hairs. “He tried to hit on me twice now- once here, once in a bar before…” She flapped her free hand.

Aegon raised the gun. So did Dad and Garlan.

“Calm down!” he said. “I was researching, and I followed a trail that lead me here…”

“Can we be more worried about the bars?” Garlan said. “Because that means more are coming.”

They prepared, which meant a frantic wave of preparation, but none of them expected the, y’know, corpses to rise as vampires.

And then Aegon went down a chute, and was asked a very important, very easy to answer question.

“Do you want your sister to live?”

5.)

She doesn’t remember much of the maze outside her nightmares. At least, that’s what she’ll tell you.

Rhaenys remembers, in the privacy of her own thoughts, the opening of a stone passage. The face of Oswell Whent. She remembers being tied to a table.

Twice.

(She remembers stabbing the bastard Greyjoy, and hopes, in the distant, cold part of her mind, that he wasn’t preserved by that freaky death maze, that Santanico did what she promised and broke it and any power the Nine Lords got from it.)

She remembers a door, and Garlan going after Willas the way Aegon would go after her. And turning away, because she wasn’t leaving while she still had hope.

But worst was after Greyjoy died.

Worst was Dad, ribs cracked and ankle twisted, other damage that she didn’t know about, trying to smile at her. 

“Ragnell, my darling,” he said, that had never ended well. “By a poet’s reckoning, you haven’t been a child in months.” Ranger Uller looked confused.

 _“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies,”_ Rhaenys explained. “We can get you out, Dad, there can’t be too many of them left, if any, and if we run into Aegon…”

“We already did,” Uller said, looking genuinely sympathetic, and then Rhaenys saw the puffy-looking bite mark on Dad’s arm.

“You survived it,” she said, because she couldn’t focus on her heart breaking, not right now. She wanted to cry, and scream, and she wanted Mom, who was somewhere that she couldn’t reach. “How?”

“Something about bloodlines, Carlos was playing with me, didn’t give me a straight answer,” he said. “Wish I could tell you more.”

Rhaenys remembered the near miracle cure of the Three Musketeers, Kingsfoil, even garlic, and wanted to weep. Their only expert had been a murderous, serial killing creep. “We keep going. Maybe… Santanico wanted the Tyrells for something. Maybe if we play on that?” Willas would help her, she thought. Plus, if Uller had missed it, Greyjoy said she, specifically, was wanted for the sacrifice to help hide the revolution going on. (Which- yay, revolution and down with sex slavery, but as the family of the innocent bystanders? Was there an actual plan here? Rhaenys was the type to worry over the cost, Arianne had always said, and making her brother a vampire made her a bit spiteful.)

Uller looked doubtful. 

Whatever was in the venom, it didn’t help his ribs. It hurt to listen to him breathe, and eventually she could feel the final collapse.

“Ragnell,” he said, and she curled up next to him. “I can’t do this.”

“Yes you can,” she said, because she had seen things in the tunnels. “We have another brother, by one of your fucking grad students, and you aren’t allowed to leave me until I see him and judge his taste.”

He huffed a laugh.

“Oh, kitten,” and he hadn’t called her that since she was seven, and starting to outgrow her habit of pouncing on everyone, “I was hurt too badly in the first place, and your brother knew it. He wanted to give us a chance to protect you.”

“I am perfectly capable of protecting myself,” she said.

“I know, but he doesn’t. It was always you two, choking out anything else. Kept you safe until now, but… I’m too far gone, and I don’t want to be one of them,” he said, lines of pain on his face. Years of students had mooned over Professor Targaryen, and she wondered what they would think of him now. “I want to die as I am.”

“Like Mom did?” Rhaenys asked, gently. She’d wondered, Aegon’d wondered, especially after Uncle had punched Dad. 

“Only with more snake monsters involved, which is something that I always thought Asshai would be the cause of me saying,” he mused. “I’ll tell her you said hello, then, and that you apologize but you won’t be seeing her for many, many years.”

Two pairs of Liz Taylor eyes met as Rhaenys settled the stake.

She repeated the same phrase three times, in three languages. English, for them and day-to-day life, Greek, for their studies together, with Rhaenys and Aegon working on translations, and Egyptian Arabic, for Mom, who had spoken it on her calls home, while she was cooking, when they were ill.

Purple eyes met serpentine, greenish-yellow.

Rhaenys pushed, and the memory ended.

She never did see Aegon in the temple, and she wondered if he was hiding from her.

+1

She had the keys and an RV that ran on desperation more than gas, but no where to go. She didn’t know if she could get Aunt Mel on the line, because, hell, Aunt Mel flitted about like a scarlet bat and was in Romania anyway, studying the Dacian culture and looking for traces of her monomyth. Viserys was currently… 

No. She refused to call Viserys.

She goes into the RV with a purpose, pulls out the cash stash, her purse, and a bag. She packs- a few changes of clothes, her laptop, Dad’s gorgeous printing of Malory, and Mom’s annotated collection of lady poets, her spiky writing like coming home. There’s a picture, too, that she tucks in, of all of them outside Chester Hall, Dad leaning contentedly against Mom, Rhaenys and Aegon trying to tackle their math homework.

There is a little more room, and she remembers her kindle charger and the first aid kit.

She isn’t waiting long when Garlan stumbles out, looking just as hollow as she does.

“Want company?” she asks, because she has the time to kill.

Because she knows that this? This doesn’t seem like anywhere near the end of it, and they wanted her. 

Because Aegon might still be out there, and he is still her mirror.

“Why not,” he shrugged. “Not in that piece of shit, though.”

It still has bits of Dad and Aegon in it, and the idea of stewing in it makes her want to vomit. “God, no.”

He nods towards to a shiny black car that costs more than a year’s Blackstock tuition. “Toss the bag in here.”

She wonders what happened to Willas- the seer of that pair of siblings, because she isn’t completely blind, though she doubts Willas’ was entirely natural. Is he a culebra-vampire like Aegon is?

She must have looked at the door a beat too long.

“He’s not coming,” Garlan said, slamming his door closed.

“Neither is Aegon,” she offered, getting in. His look was actually understanding, which was… hey, she’d seen enough to get the feeling Garlan had been played like a fiddle. 

She had a bad-luck name, that’s why Mom wanted it changed, she thought, as they drove off. Maybe she’d use something else. 

 _Scarlet_ , came a voice that sounded like Aegon’s, quick and ghost-like.

**Author's Note:**

> The poetry Rhaenys quotes is from Edna St. Vincent Millay, which is I think the only not entirely obvious one. (Kingsfoil = Lord of the Rings?)


End file.
